Homeland by Sam Lipsyte (excerpt) – This one won’t be unfamiliar to LitBlog readers. Lipsyte’s paperback original has some great black humor and was well deserving of the attention it garnered.

Bitter Milk by John McManus (excerpt [pdf]) – John’s debut novel after two well received short story collections, and it is quite original with a narrator that may or may not exist, and if he does, it could be in various relationships to the youth he narrates about.

Belly by Lisa Selin Davis (excerpt) – Another debut effort, Davis takes an interesting look at how small to mid-size American towns are changing, or Walmartizing, in the 21st Century. That she doesthis and allows her readers deep into the relationships of a specific family is pretty impressive.Garner by Kirstin Allio (excerpt) – A winner from Coffee House Press – Allio writes of a small New England town and sets her tale nearly a century in the past. Her descriptions of the landscapes and the townfolk put her readers right in their lives.

Last year’s list had two authors that were established, but not nearly as much as they should have been, in Steve Yarbrough and Percival Everett. This year sees a similarity with authors Lee Martin and Walter Kirn:

The Bright Forever by Lee Martin (excerpt) – His second novel and sixth book (including a hard to find chapbook) overall, The Bright Forever is a stunning novel told in various points of view. A little girl disappears and Martin slowly allows his readers the full story – the anguish and honesty he is able to infuse his characters with as they spill this tale is incredible.

Mission to America by Walter Kirn (excerpt) – Like Martin, not a newcomer, but a well-respected author who hasn’t received the sort of attention that he has with this latest effort which only boosts Kirn’s reputation as one of today’s better satirists. He takes on religion, new ageism, health nuts, and many others his latest.

Short Story Collections

Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap (excerpt) – An excellent debut collection from this author whose name is sprinkled about in the story anthologies the past two years – Best New American Writing, BASS, O’Henry, etc.

God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell (excerpt) – Bissell lets his experiences in the Peace Corps and as a journalist lead him into many excellent short stories mainly set throughout countries formerly part of the USSR. The best in this collection will rival the best you’ll read this year.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami (blog) – This collection, Lalami’s first, follows four Moroccans as they try to find what they hope will be better lives if they can get into Spain. The stories are very well written and the collection is set up very interestingly with the story of the attempted trip to Spain leading off, and then individual stories about each of the four characters Lalami concentrates on – first a story of each of their lives prior to the trip, and then a story of each of their lives after it.

We’re in Trouble by Christopher Coake (excerpt) – Coake is a writer not afraid to tackle the longer story as this collection has a novella or two in it. He’s also not afraid to tackle heartbreak and sorrow, but does so in a manner that doesn’t beat his readers up. He gets right into the minds and feelings of his characters.

Copy Cats by David Crouse (excerpt) – One of this year’s Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award winners. The collection has some excellent stories, including the title story which leads it off, but the big winner is a stunning novella that leads me to hoping Crouse is working on something a bit longer like a debut novel to look forward to.

Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn (excerpt) – With her debut, Reinhorn slips into T.C. Boyle neighborhood – her opening lines completely grab the reader and let them know that the author is completely aware of her characters and their situations. The stories also tend to grab odd situations you hear of occasionally, but rarely read about, and use them to allow her characters to move their lives forward.

Non-Fiction

Orphans by Charles D’Ambrosio – (excerpt) – This collection of essays has the bonus of being an interesting little book published by Clear Cut Press. Besides the different look, and pocket size, the book has D’Ambrosio’s writing which is frequently stellar. I found myself reading about religious haunted houses and mobile home inspections without being able to set the book down – a true testament to his writing. Beyond those couple of essays, there are some really interesting efforts that were previously published in a Seattle alternative newspaper about topics I’d be more inclined to read about.

House: A Memoir by Michael Ruhlman Ruhlman continues as one of the best in the non-fiction genre these days, choosing a topic and writing about it, completely covering it and allowing the reader to appreciate it in ways they may never have considered. Following past efforts that took on single sex education, cooking, and wooden boats, this time around, Ruhlman writes of a 200 year old house in Cleveland that he and his wife purchase and restore.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen) (interview) – I don’t think I set this 300 plus page book down once after I started reading it. Alexievich, at danger to her own self, visited the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and interviewed anybody she could find who would talk – people who had been firefighters, or relatives of residents who evacuated, those who didn’t, hunters of animals left behind, etc. It’s absolutely fascinating to read what happened, how people found out, and the various reactions to the news.

One Last Book

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train by Brad Vice – Unless you already have a copy, or are willing to drop nearly a thousand dollars to obtain one, you’ll not get a chance to read this former Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award winner. The press recalled and pulped as many of the copies as they could (and it sounds like they got most of the small print run) due to what is being referred to as plagiarism in the opening story, “Tuscaloosa Knights.” It’s too bad something else couldn’t have been figured out as Vice is one helluva writer. If you look around, you can find many of the stories that are within the pages of the few copies floating around – at least two have been in the Algonquin Best New Stories of the South series in the past few years. A recent Five Points has the story, Mule, in it. The story that caused the trouble can be seen at www.storysouth.com (look for the link there to Thicket, where the story truly is located).{Ed: Dan recently responded to further allegations of plagiarism against Brad Vice at his blog.}

With the year drawing to a close, so too is our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as those who helped us put together such a great group of people to participate.We'd also like to thank all of our readers for a great year at The Millions - the best ever in terms of visitors, but also in more qualitative respects. We touched on many great books and many great topics and our readers were always there to offer their insights. We hope to make The Millions even more of a "must read" destination in 2008, so stay tuned.Meanwhile, we're going to take a break around here for a couple of days, but, in the spirit of the Year in Reading, we invite all of you to finish this sentence in the comments: "The best book I read all year was..."

I present to you two writers of fiction that rearranged my brain, origamied my heart into a better heart: a bigger and stranger and certainly weirder one, more equipped to face life. Oh, life! I haven't slept in ages!

2016 was the year I fell in love with reading again. Sometime during college, when close reading put every sentence under a fluorescent light, I started analyzing language instead of getting lost in it. I thought I would return to reading after I graduated, but then I became a copyeditor, where my job was to find every grammatical blemish and factual imperfection. It’s hard to enjoy a book when you profoundly disagree with how a writer uses punctuation (I’m looking at you, Hanya Yanagihara). The very thing that had gotten me into my major and career was now a chore. Yet I wanted to be a reader, so I compulsively bought books that would topple off my nightstand, a reminder I was getting through more Netflix than novels. I didn’t know what I needed to read, but my friends did, and their passionate recommendations for things I would normally never read reminded me why I sometimes find more solace or excitement in a book than anything.
My friend Jen is not just an A Little Life fan, though she has read it four times; she is an evangelist. So I wasn’t surprised when it showed up on my doorstep as a Christmas gift last year. Getting through a 720-page book wasn’t an enjoyable experience for a slow reader like me, especially when nothing seemed to happen except trauma. When the ultimate trauma transpired, I was so angry that I rage-cried and would’ve thrown the hardcover across the room if it weren’t two pounds. I told Jen I hated it -- at least I thought I did. But after I finished, I couldn’t stop discussing it or reading Hanya Yanagihara interviews. I even had a dinner date with my friend Susan, another great reader, to discuss why I hated it, but midway through she asked me, “Is it possible you actually loved it?” She was right; I had mistaken my intense passion for hatred when it was really love. Yes, nothing happened, Yanagihara doesn’t understand pronouns, and the ending was infuriating, but I couldn’t remember the last time a book had completely consumed me like that.
When my YA book club picked The Royal We for February, I internally groaned. I had always found the royal family ridiculous, so why would I want to read a fictionalized account of Kate Middleton and Prince William’s courtship if Kate were American? But the book ended up being one of the most damned delightful things I’d read all year, the literary equivalent of the frappucino you told yourself you were too sophisticated for but still secretly loved. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan deliver on all the royal intrigue and scandal, from frosty Queen Elizabeth II to sexy bad boy Prince Harry, but really it’s the romance that makes all the royal drama worth it, like Richard Curtis meets Buckingham Palace. The novel made me miss the U.K. and the British friends I made while a University of Edinburgh student so much that I planned a solo trip to London that summer. I even visited an extremely obscure museum that I read about in the book, the Sir John Soane’s Museum; I recommend it for oddity alone.
I also have my book club to thank for one of the craziest reading experiences I had this year -- getting through the entire four-book Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater in a weekend. I have a reputation for never actually finishing the book, so when we decided to read a series in preparation for the release of The Raven King, I knew I was screwed. I expected I’d hate this bizarre mashup of Welsh myth, psychics, and prep school, but I was so enthralled by the world building, strong relationships, and ultimate metaphor for growing up that I stayed up until 3 a.m. two nights in a row. The books are also so creepy, with the protagonists wandering through catacombs and whatnot, that I had to keep every light on in my apartment. I told Stiefvater this in person when my book club attended a YA book festival in Charleston, YALL Fest, and she was so excited that she highfived me with a Sharpie in hand.
These books have nothing in common with each other, other than how I found myself fully engrossed while reading them. But they remind me that sometimes the best reading experiences are the ones we least expect. So I plan to read boldly and bravely because I’ll need some good escapism these next four years.
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